Top 6 Ways How to Check Your Website Backlinks

How to Check Websites Backlinks / Check PR / Check Internal Pagerank / PR Checking tools

1. Google Webmaster Console (http://www.google.com/webmasters)- absolute leader for checking backlinks. Webmaster console is probably the most accurate source for backlink checking. The big downside is that you can only check backlinks for your own websites. Also, some people say that its yet another way for Google how to get more information about your site - if you are doing something dodgy, be careful.

2. Yahoo SiteExplorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)- if you don't have access to the webmaster console then Yahoo is your tool. Its not as accurate as GWC but still good enough. You can see up to 1000 backlinks for every domain but results include nofollow links as well. You can also export backlinks to TSV file (like CSV but separated with tabs), but only a current page.

3. Google Allinanchor command - This is not very known trick. Using allinanchor command with your website name you can get quite a lot of backlinks for your site. The advantage is that using that method you can get links which were not reported by google link command or yahoo siteexplorer e.g.

allinanchor:www.yourwebsite.com or allinanchor: yourwebsite

The disadvantage is that if your website name is a generic phrase then you will get lots of results which are not links to your site.


4. SEO Elite, Backlink Analyzer etc. (http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer) , (http://www.seoelite.com) - These tools can help you with digging up backlinks from search engines in an easier way. You don't have to manually check every page in Google/Yahoo as this tool compiles a report with backlinks along with other useful information like Google Pagerank, Alexa rating etc..

5. Alternative search engines - There are other search engines that can give you information about backlinks:
MSN - uses link operator like G or Y - link:http://www.yourwebsite.com
Exalead - uses link operator like G or Y - link:http://www.yourwebsite.com
These search engines can give you sometime a backlink which is not reported by Yahoo SiteExplorer, but mostly its waste of time.

6. Google alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) - This is a less known one. You can set Google Alerts on your domain like - http://www.yourwebsite.com and Google will send you a n email when the link is found somewhere on the web. This is a cool way how to check for new links but Google will report also pages where only your website is mentioned but no real link is present. The disadvantage of this method is that Google Alerts are not as accurate as they could be, sometimes emails are not being sent, even Google have indexed a page with the link.


Best Pagerank Checking Tools
http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php
http://check-backlink.com/cgi-bin/bl_checker.pl

Have I missed something? Any suggestions/corrections are welcome.